Hot Accommodation in Akka

Question

In these slides: http://www.slideshare.net/jboner/introducing-akka I read that Akka supports hot deployment. The way I understand this term, I can make changes to the code without restarting my application and losing its current state.

This is what I might need for my scala / akka application. But how am I really doing a hot deployment? What tools and techniques should be used?

Answer 1

It is unclear what state you want to save? Actors mailboxes? Remote access configuration? All this is not trivial for reasoning under ordinary conditions, not to mention hot swapping.

If you are thinking of something in the strict sense of OSGI, then not at all. However, you have several options.

You can change the behavior of actors at runtime using a variety of methods that are easiest to become / unsafe. This sometimes means that it means hot.

A general approach might be to deploy your new code with new nodes, join the cluster, and then kill the previous nodes.